Officials In Los Angeles Are Seizing ‘Tiny Homes’ From Homeless

Los Angeles City officials have started seizing the tiny homes built by a local man and donated to homeless people in the city to give them a place to sleep.

Los Angeles city council member Curren Price recently requested that sanitation officials confiscate and destroy a number of tiny homes.

Elvis Summers a Los Angeles builder, set up the compact housess, which are the size of a parking spot and come with solar-powered lights, over the past year after receiving more than $100,000 in donations from around the world.

Expressing his outrage in a video on the tiny house Facebook page, Summers said that he plans to take legal action.

“I will not quit and I will not turn my back on these people,” he said. “I will still fight this all the way.”

“I build tiny houses for the homeless because it’s the right thing to do. We are all human beings and nobody should be homeless,” he told Inside Edition back in December.

A petition has been launched requesting that authorities stop seizing and destroying the tiny houses. Click HERE to view and sign.

However, the City of Los Angeles considers the compact buildings a blight. A new city ordinance calls the structures “bulky items” that are subject to immediate confiscation, according to the Los Angeles Times.

As part of an effort to clean up the streets and stamp out homeless encampments, the LA Bureau of Sanitation seized the houses. Summers himself was required to take away seven of them on Wednesday and Thursday.

“I just had to evict an elderly woman whose veteran husband is missing in the city,” Summers told the LA Times. “It’s really frustrating that I seem to be the only person actually doing something now to help people, and the city is still claiming that they are helping people when they are really not. They are wiping out camps all across the city.”

Summers said he erected 37 tiny homes with $100,000 in donations in an online video campaign.

Councilman Curren Price says that the houses are disruptive to the South Los Angeles neighborhood that he represents.

“I’m getting complaints from constituents who have to walk in to the streets to avoid them,” he told the paper.